Finally got around to watching Cristopher Nolan's Dunkirk (2017) last night. I liked it; I thought it had the right tone, pace and color palate for a movie about men just trying to survive.
One of the things that struck me was how small and amateurish it seemed compared to D-Day four years later. So I went and looked up the numbers, and, yeah, it is amazing how much stuff the combattants had built in four years. For example, the Luftwaffe force trying to halt the evacuation had 300 bombers; the Allied air force preparing for D-Day had 2,200 bombers. (And of course they were bigger planes. A majority of them were British, so this wasn't just about US industrial power.) The D-Day paratroop drop involved 925 planes carrying paratroopers and a further 500 towing gliders.
The Dunkirk evacuation fleet included one cruiser, 48 destroyers, 45 troop ships, 8 eight hospital ships, 36 minesweepers, and about 700 smaller vessels; the D-Day fleet included 5 battleships, 20 cruisers, 65 destroyers, 210 troop and supply ships, 277 minesweepers, and 5,000 smaller vessels.
On the other hand, in terms of people moved across the Channel, the Dunkirk fleet did pretty well. On June 6 the D-Day fleet took 160,000 men across to France, compared to a peak of 68,000 in one day for the Dunkirk evacuation. But the D-Day figure was by far the most taken in one day in 1944. The number for all of June was 875,000, which means that after June 6 an average of 30,000 men per day were taken across. In the nine days of the Dunkirk evacuation, 338,000 were taken over, an average of 37,000 per day. Which right there explains why many British people thought it was a miraculous victory.
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